Sunday, March 04, 2012

Evocative Ephemera

Sometimes its the items of ephemera that tell a story, or suggest one at least, that draw me in. This, for example, was rescued today from a charity shop where it had been languishing. It is a badly self-bound collection of two communist pamphlets and loads of pages with newspaper clippings tipped onto them, all on the theme of Fifth Columnists from a communist point of view. I just love the amateurness of it and the way it suggests someone's mind at work. Did they envisage themselves as some kind of crusading communist during the Second War? Did they imagine that they were an counter-espionage agent working on an unofficial basis for the security of the country? Of course, we'll never know what prompted the collation of all this material but now, in a different age, and in its shabby homemade style, it is a very evocative item.

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About Me

I am a bookcollector, bookdealer, publisher and writer living in Portsmouth on the South Coast of the UK.
This blog is my personal space for the recording of my numerous interests including science-fiction, victorian and vintage photography, gay literature, book design, typography, homoerotic artwork, the Amazon river, the books of Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Forrest Reid, sundry gay Victorian and Edwardian characters, Slash Fiction, Samuel R Delany, Vintage swimwear, Willard Price, Venice, and so on...
Alongside all of that you also get a personal journal of life and memoir and the self-therapy you have come to know and love from bloggers.